Netatmo Personal Indoor/Outdoor Weather Station Review

What’s the air quality like in your room? What’s the temperature inside and outside right now? And most importantly, what’s the humidity like so you can plan your hairdo? The brand new device, Netatmo, can tell you all of this and more from the convenience of your iPhone. That’s right, you can constantly monitor the environment inside and outside of your home, from your iPhone, iOS device, or Android.

Checking the weather online might suffice for most people, but the recorded weather may not actually be accurate for right outside your home. Weather is dependent on weather stations, so if it’s not placed near your home, there’s no telling its accuracy. The Netatmo is essentially your own personal weather station, offering a myriad of useful information, including air quality.

Netatmo consists of three things: the inside module, the outdoor module, and the iOS app. The inside and outside modules are nearly identical, except the outside station is shorter than inside. Both have very appealing designs as aluminum cylinders with white trim. There’s a bar on the front of both that illuminates on demand, or on schedule, with a color to reflect the air quality. It’s constructed from a single piece of durable aluminum. After a bad mishap outside, I can guarantee the durability of the design. The inside station is powered by a USB wall adapter, while the outside module can last up to a year on 4 AAA batteries (included).

The Netatmo app is very cool, but it’s worth talking about the setup first, which is also quite cool. The outside Netatmo is able to wirelessly talk to the indoor Netatmo, which has WiFi capabilities and is easily hooked up to a wireless network. This keeps cables to a minimum and usability to a maximum. With network access, you’re able to check in on your Netatmo from anywhere in the world; you don’t need to be connected to your own network. Netatmo records the environment every five minutes, or on demand with a soft button on top of the inside module.

The Netatmo app is super informative. At first it’s a bit overwhelming, until you realize you can overlay a help menu on top of every statistic.

Netatmo monitors the following:

Indoor Air Quality

Outdoor Air Quality

Humidity

Temperature (inside and out)

CO2 (Indoor)

Acoustic Comfort (Indoor)

Barometric Pressure

Weather

Netatmo is recording around the clock, and you can access any of the data in real-time or view it over time. The data’s yours so you can even export it. As an interesting use-case, I was able to use the acoustic comfort sound meter to determine that my loud neighbors would actually party all the way until sunrise on weeknights. It’s also been helpful to compare the indoor temperature to my thermostat and also determine the temperature while no one’s home.

Netatmo teaches you about the environment you live in and also how to improve it. For example, I learned how indoor CO2 build-up happens and how it can become unhealthy. Netatmo pushes notifications straight to my iPhone when CO2 concentration is too high and recommends I open a window. The Netatmo app has a timeline where it logs all of the alerts.

All-in-all, using Netatmo has been a pretty insightful experience. I now know how the internet temperature differs from the actual temperature outside, I’ve learned how accurate my indoor thermostat is, I’ve learned about indoor CO2 build-up, the causes, effects, and solution, and I like to think it’s helped me improve my indoor living experience (important for a blogger!). I also love being able to check-in on the indoor and outdoor temperature anywhere, anytime, and also go back in time and look at trends. The Netatmo is undoubtedly a cool device. The real question is, can you justify its $179 price tag? It’s definitely not cheap, though it’s extremely cool, with a great app, and can offer a lot of value to some. The Netatmo Weather Station for iPhone, iPad, iOS and Android is currently available from Netatmo.com.

The Good: Polished app for iOS and Android (Including iPad App), Great design and build quality, Wi-Fi connectivity with anywhere access, Outdoor module runs on batteries for up to a year, Records and keeps logs of various metrics, Graphs, Push notifications to inform and improve indoor air quality, App teaches user about all of the metrics, Easy installThe Bad: Not optimized for iPhone 5 yet, Expensive, Web app should mirror mobile app, Outdoor air quality isn’t monitored – it’s pulled from an online feed